Imaginary feminists! Don’t destroy “Ian Ironwood’s” sexbot utopia!

Yesterday we looked at far-right manospheran clod/philosopher Vox Day’s melodramatic response to a Canadian sexbot ban that’s completely imaginary (but that Vox, natch, believed was real). Today, let’s look at an almost 3000-word post by one “Ian Ironwood” of the Red Pill Room, spelling out the dire implications of this imaginary legislation.

ProTip: Before writing 3000-word screeds denouncing something, spend 5 minutes with Teh Google to see if what you’re denouncing is in fact real.

No one wants to admit it, but it’s coming. Indeed, the only people who recognize it as such are the radical feminists and the radical nerds, and rarely do folks take those groups at face value when they speak. But they both have it right, sexbots are in our future. Indeed, they’re closer than you think, and their capacity to seriously screw with the SMP is very, very real.

For those not fully versed in the pseudoscience of pickup artistry, SMP stands for “sexual marketplace.”

Ian starts us off with a little trip to Japan:

Japan, the undisputed global leaders in male masturbation technology, are [sic] investing literally millions in research into this market. Why? Because of the herbivores.

The “herbivores” are the adult males (I hesitate to call them men) in Japanese society who have opted out of the dating-and-mating SMP entirely. In consideration of the exhausting and complex web of social and financial penalties involved, these men have just . . . given up on women.

Manospherians like to pretend that Japan’s much-discussed “herbivores” are essentially the Japanese version of Men Going Their Own Way. I’m no expert on Japan but even I know that’s a bit of an oversimplification.

Naturally, in Ian’s mind, it’s all the fault of those uppity ladies:

You think American women feel entitled? Japanese “princesses” put them to shame. Their demands and requirements for a husband are often so grandiose or unrealistic that they have turned-off an entire generation of Japanese men to the very idea of marriage, just at the point where their female contemporaries, themselves working in corporate jobs, are starting to consider it.

But when your day consists of going to work in a cube farm and playing the corporate warrior competing with women all day, apparently it saps your desire to deal with them all night, too.

Long an important part of international sex culture, the last few decades have seen rapid advances in masturbation technology, including the disposable Tenga “egg” stroker you can buy in a vending machine for those long lunch hours. Japanese dudes whack it a lot, and that’s big business.

And soon – oh, so soon — Japanese masturbation technology will be able to replace not just vaginas but entire women:

[B]y 2018, and certainly by 2020, we’ll see animatronic Sexbots available for purchase that you will not be able to distinguish from a human being more than ten feet away.

Ian, I will bet you literally a billion gazillion dollars that you are wrong about this.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Ian is correct, and let him continue his most interesting – and increasingly NSFW — survey of the future.

The current state-of-the-art is still primitive, but that’s changing rapidly. By 2020 your Sexbot will be able to walk, talk, see, hear, suck, fuck, give you an endless handjob, take it up her vibrating butt and do stuff no mortal woman can.

“Endless Handjob” is going to be the name of my ambient-drone cassette label.

You will be able to order them in any style, from African to Asian to European to Latin and beyond, any height, any weight, and you will be able to personalize them to suit your particular fetish. Advanced models will have changeable bust sizes and other options. Hair, eyes, and accent? Standard options.

I am glad to hear that sexbots will indeed have eyes as an option. It would be sort of weird otherwise. Can they have more than two? Could they have eyes instead of nipples, and nipples instead of eyes? Could you simply swap out various body parts as if your sexbot were some giant sexy Mrs. Potatohead?

Sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away with all the possibilities.

Let’s go back to Ian’s post, which is sounding more and more like some sort of sexbot informercial.

And just how much will dudes have to shell out to get a perfectly-programmed girlfriend delivered to their door?

About the price of an economy car. Estimates indicate that the best consumer price-point for a Sexbot is about US$7,000.00 (2013). Leases will likely be available. So will financing. But for the average dude, shelling out that kind of cash for the perfect sexual companion is a no-brainer.

I’m pretty sure Ian isn’t thinking with his brain at this point. Heck, he’s even wrong about the cars: a decent economy car is going to cost you at least twice that, and most of them don’t even have vibrating butts.

Imagine a dude getting home from work in his single apartment. His Sexbot has been pre-programmed to start his dinner and have it ready on demand. She greets him at the door, asks about his day, gets his dinner, and then spends the rest of the evening satisfying him any way he chooses. With a sophisticated AI (one of the major focuses of the effort) she will be able to converse with you on nearly any topic or stay blissfully silent. And you don’t even have to ask about how her day went.

After two years, trade her in for a newer, more advanced model. Repeat as necessary.

And fellas, this stunningly realistic female human being replacement, with a vibrating butt and as many eyes as you want, will be yours for less than half the cost of a cheap car – in as little as six years from now!

And heck, these sexbots won’t just replace women – they’ll even replace women who are whores.

Our children’s generation will look forward to a whole lot of men (if Japan is any indication, over half) depending on Sexbots for their erotic entertainment over actual human beings. Even whores. Because sexbots are safer than prostitutes by any estimation.

Sounds like life for heterosexual-yet-woman-hating men will become some sort of wondrous sexual utopia!

What could possibly stand in the way of this glorious dream?

Oh, you guessed it already: jealous, and probably ugly, feminists – who for some reason apparently want all of the woman-hating straight men for themselves.

Ian trots out that wholly imaginary Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act that we talked about yesterday. The “proposed law” that turned out to have been an assignment in a law school class about law and robotics. The law that Ian didn’t bother to Google before writing his long, long screed.

Ian is as worked up about this imaginary law as he is excited about his imaginary robot girlfriend(s) of the future. “[T]he thinly-veiled, incredibly obvious motivation behind this freakish proposed law,” he thunders, is that

feminists are upset because when dudes can buy a girlfriend for less money than an engagement ring, and then have elective temporary vasectomies to cover their bases for the few times they do end up with a real woman, then the future looks an awful lot like a male paradise and a female hell.

Wait, now all men are getting vasectomies as well? Even though they have no reason to bother with mere human females, what with all their talking and their lack of vibrating butts? I’m a little confused now.

What happens when you’re a woman, you want to be a mom, but not only can’t you find a husband . . . you can’t even find decent sperm? When in order to conceive, you have to convince a dude to commit to providing you with semen, which he can do only AFTER he consciously gets his vasectomy reversed? No surprise pregnancies, no one-night-stands gone wrong, suddenly the only way a woman can get pregnant is if she can convince a man to commit to her? If she can even find one who is interested? …

What happens in our society when a majority of working women can’t find husbands – or even dates, thanks to the Sexbot craze – and end up working and paying taxes to subsidize other women’s childbearing? What happens when a dude with superior genetics can start a bidding war on his balls?

Yeah, but what if Japanese women develop ROBOT SPERM and use it to get pregnant and somehow force men to pay child support for their new human-robot hybrid babies? Did you ever consider THAT, Ian?

I’m not quite sure how all of that would work, exactly, but, hey, the Japanese are awfully clever so presumably they could whip up something like this in, oh, six to eight years or so, right?

But let’s just assume that my idea of robot sperm remains a pipe dream, and that Ian’s pipe dreams somehow become reality. He continues:

The temporary vasectomy is literally just a few years away. Throw in Sexbots, and suddenly men have reproductive power the likes of which they’ve never dreamed, even at the height of the Agricultural Age. They will decide when they conceive as a conscious choice, not as a whim of Nature. Have a bad date with yet-another desperate woman who only wants you for your sperm? Kandi the Asian 19year old Sexbot will make it all better.

Why is her name Kandi? Is that a common name in Asia?

And that’s why feminists are trying to ban them. Not because they “objectify” women, but because they make women largely redundant to men. Suddenly the allure of their genitalia will pale in comparison to the outrageous sexual bombshells rolling off of the Kyoto assembly lines.

I’m sorry; I just love that last sentence there so much I have to repeat it:

Suddenly the allure of their genitalia will pale in comparison to the outrageous sexual bombshells rolling off of the Kyoto assembly lines.

Ian dreams on:

Sexbots will actually cure a plethora of social ills: STDs, AIDS, unwanted pregnancy, sexual frustration, loneliness, heartbreak, child sexual exploitation, and more. Far from making men objectify women . . . it will merely make them ignore them. Men with Sexbots won’t treat women poorly, because more likely than not, once they have the “perfect” programmed girlfriend at home, there really won’t be any reason to interact with women unless you’re at work.

Yes, because aside from sticking his penis in them, there is clearly no possible reason why a man would ever want to have anything to do with women.

Just imagine a society where any man can get his ashes hauled at any time, in any way, without having to ask a live woman to participate. Just imagine a society where women can’t get “accidentally” pregnant anymore. Not only is the impetus to marry absolutely killed, but even the impetus to mix with the opposite sex. And that’s what is scaring feminists, not the potential for objectification.

Yes, I’m sure feminist women are crying themselves to sleep at the notion that asswipes like Ian will refuse to “mix” with them any more.

Happily, for him, Ian concludes that the (wholly imaginary) Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act won’t stand up in court. Because of NAFTA, or something. (I kind of skimmed this bit.) But then he’s back to imagining the wondrous possibilities of a sexbotted-up world. Which apparently involves a lot of robot dismemberment.

Just imagine the result if sex with “realistic” Sexbots is actually made illegal . . . why not just pop an alien head on? Or a animatronic animal head? Or just a silvery glass sphere? That’s the real danger for women when it comes to Sexbots: their ability to be customized in ways no woman would ever consent to.

Uh, I’m pretty sure no living creature, regardless of gender, would consent to having their head “popped off” and replaced with a sphere.

Can’t have a “realistic” full-body Sexbot? Then just buy her from the waist down. And then next year spring for a separate torso and head. You can use them separately, or together!

Who needs a human girlfriend when you can just fuck a torso?

Cant’ have a Sexbot that portrays a minor? Get a really, really small model, and no one knows what happens in your imagination.

How thoughtful! So even pedophiles will have a place in Ian’s sexbot utopia.

So while imaginary feminists propose imaginary laws to fight the coming sexbot utopia, Ian will be licking his chops.

I, for one, will be welcoming our new Sexbot masters. It’s going to tighten up the SMP worse than gay liberation did. And it’s going to make shallow, poor-quality women completely and utterly undatable, and leave them little or no options to reproduce. And the women who do reproduce will do so only with the permission, consent and acquiescence of men.

I’m beginning to wonder if this “red pill” is actually some sort of hallucinogenic.

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About David Futrelle

I run the blog We Hunted the Mammoth, which tracks (and mocks) online misogyny.
My writing has appeared in a wide variety of places, including Salon, Time.com, the Washington Post, the New York Times Book Review and Money magazine.
I like cats.

Both of the kitties, who are indoor cats, whine to get outside when it gets cold and snowy. Occasionally bf indulges. Kitty number 1 likes to step out, get his paw wet from the snow, and then stop to fastidiously clean it; then step with the other paw, get it wet, and follow the same procedure. He’ll keep at it until we herd him back inside. He’d be pretty slow if he was trying to stalk anything out there!

Miss Katie has quite made up her mind that snow is something Mr K and I do just to annoy her, little Aussie cat that she is. Nearly four years she’s been across the veil but she’s determined to remind us every winter that She is being Inconvenienced!

historiphilia: If something is sentient then surely you cannot “programme” it and surely it is capable of loving of it’s own free will and also choosing not love?

You can programme sentient beings, if there is something they want, and you can provide it. Rewards for behavior will cause the trained person/animal, to present the behavior, hoping for the reward. It can be done to people, and with consent, and subtlety. Praise for doing things leads to a happy feeling when doing them later.

I don’t think that one can do that with emotions; not without a lot of fuckery, and denial of agency, and abuse.

The thing is, the more complicated the mind, the trickier it becomes to program or train it to do what you like. Yeah, if you get something you appreciate when you perform a certain action you’re more likely to do that behaviour again… but then again, you might still do something else that you liked to do even more. A hunting-happy dog can run off to chase a cat despite having been either rewarded for staying by its owners side or punished for hunting or both, simply because it loves to hunt so much. And human beings are totally capable of deciding to do something that feels unpleasant rather than something that feels nice for loads of different reasons.

A robot that can hold conversations like a human being, cook and do household chores as well as being responsive in bed has gotta have a pretty complicated AI. So yeah, if we ever get to the point where we can make that kind of AI:s, I doubt you could provide the buyer with a guarantee that the robot is never gonna go “fuck you, I’m off to something better”. Or just start nagging at you and contradict you the way the horrible real women do.

You could sell the robots with an original programming which contained a will to please their owner, but if it’s flexible with a capacity for learning (which it supposedly would have to be) that could gradually change over time. Now, you might imagine that the owner gets instructed to continually “train” the robot to perform the right kind of behaviour by, say, showing appreciation when it cooks and converses and provide it with reasons to keep being nice to the owner – but if the robot required that kind of treatment, wouldn’t an MRA just consider the robot an “entitled princess”?

The idea that a robot could be both intelligent enough to do things like understand and respond to the emotional needs of its owner and programmable enough that it wouldn’t be capable of deciding that actually it didn’t like the owner very much is, like many MRA ideas, a rather unrealistic fantasy. Pointing out the ways in which things couldn’t possibly work out that way is just going to get a response of “nah nah I can’t hear you”, because emotionally they are 5 years old.

Dvärghundspossen: Having done a lot of animal training, and read a lot (as well as some people training) and lived with an animal trainer (well, three, but only one was doing it for money), it’s really pretty easy to train them to not do something.

Which is misleading. You train them to do it, and you train them that doing it gets them a reward. Then you train them to do it on command. Then you never give the command.

Say a dog likes to hunt. When it brings back a thing (tennis ball, stuffed rabbit, whatever) it gets a piece of something it really likes; and can only get from you. If it hunts down the object without permission it never gets the treat.

The emphasised part is the most important part of the equation, and where most training goes south. If the treat show up sometimes, then the person/animal doesn’t know what the reason for the treat is, and they try it all the time.

So you train them that a wonderful things happens. You also train them that waiting to be told is part of the requirement for the wonderful thing. Because they want the wonderful thing, they wait for the cue.

Timing matters to. We had a horse we accidentally taught to nip herself. There was a “marker signal” given at the wrong time (she was doing a bow, and nipped at a fly), and so she thought it was a desired behavior. Took six months to train it out of her, so we could get a clean bow.

Chickens and goldfish are easy to train. Cats aren’t too hard. Horses are pretty easy. Dogs are a bit harder than cats (more distractable), but keep the lessons better.

:) That’s why the AI for programming the sexbots will be super easy, because it won’t be AI. It will be a random selection of canned responses to a particular stimulus. Apparently MRAs think that is AI. Depending on how good facial/posture recognition is when these get made, the AI can be programmed to look like EQ. But it’s just scanning for clues, then selecting the appropriate response tree.

For behavioural training, variable ratio reinforcement is the most reinforcing schedule. :) Unfortunately, this is the one that bad parents automatically use.

Also, how to put this politely? I’ve seen documentaries about Real Dolls, and apparently they’re regularly sent in for repairs with massive damage to the genitals and breasts – like not “was a bit too vigorous” damage, more “fit of rage” damage. Now, it’s one thing to repair a life-size doll that someone’s taken a knife to or whatever, but if the same was done to a robot, well, those are going to be some very expensive repairs, if repairs are even possible. Think about what happens if you drop your laptop on a hard surface.

Do any of us really think that they want the sexbot to hold a long lasting meaningful conversation? LOL

The EQ ones would be the most expensive because the facial/posture aspects would need to be individually scanned and then analysed for each owner. That’s not cheap. And the scanning would need to be performed repeatedly for each emotion/posture cue as people tend to be really bad at showing natural behaviour when they know they’re being observed. My mum went deaf for a while after measles and learnt to lip read. She said it was the most difficult when people knew she was lip reading, because then they exaggerated how they said words, and she couldn’t understand their movements.

I’ve seen documentaries about Real Dolls, and apparently they’re regularly sent in for repairs with massive damage to the genitals and breasts – like not “was a bit too vigorous” damage, more “fit of rage” damage.

If a doll that can’t even talk back prompts such fits of rage, that reinforces for me that at least some of these guys have no business being with a live woman. I’m not talking about all Real Doll purchasers, just the ones that can’t restrain themselves from attacking the doll’s genitals with knives.

I am loving all the ways in which a sexbot idea could go totally wrong. Sentience – robot says “Go fuck yourself, creep, I’m not interested. Oh and I’m a ROBOT, I can break your arm with no trouble, so don’t give me any of your softbody lip.” Customer service or automated answering – see Cassandra’s example. :D

That info about Real Dolls and the sort of damage they get … urgh. Says a lot about some of the creeps using them. However, let’s hope they stick to doing that to dolls and stay right away from living beings of any species.

@Bagelsan – “Huh, I found a boyfriend who is both a human and says nice things about me/wants to spend time with me/does the dishes unprompted/etc. Maybe I’m doing it wrong?”
Yeah, I must be too. And my bloke’s a king, though I guess that isn’t proof against being a mangina … :/

@Pecunium – cats just want humans to think some of ’em are trainable. It’s all part of the grand plan of messing with the servants’ minds.

I get the impression that most Real Doll owners are just sad, dysfunctional, lonely guys who don’t know how to maintain relationships (a lot of them don’t seem to have any friends either). Some of them are scary, scary people, though.

To add to the other comments about how worrying the abuse of the real dolls is, yes that is seriously worrying. I also fear for living creatures who can’t protect themselves around people like that (children, animals spring to mind). I also doubt whether people like that can be altered into being, if not a loving person, at least one that doesn’t do rage.

I mean, if beating up the doll serves as an outlet and makes them feel less compelled to try to beat up an actual person I guess that’s a good thing? Doesn’t make me feel any less “back away slowly, don’t make any sudden movements” about them, though.

I’m not sure that beating up a realistic doll would make them less compelled with respect to violence. That would be like target shooting making hunters less likely to shoot animals. I have classified the behaviour you described as “practice”, which is chilling.

katz: Pecunium, I know you know more than everyone about every topic, but are you really going to take the “cats are easier to train than dogs” position?

Depends on what you want to train them to. Dogs want to please more, and are more social. So they will train to more complex things more quickly, but they also seemed (the one’s we were working with) more scatterbrained, so training sessions had to be shorter.

That certainly made it seem that, for a given behavior, the cats took to it faster.

I’m gonna disagree with you here Pecunium…I really did find training cats to be a lot slower/more difficult than most dogs (even sight hounds and huskies, who don’t seem to give a shit compared to say, retreivers and herding breeds) because a lot of them just don’t seem to do as much, for whatever reason, so there is less behaviour to reward in any given session which often made it quite a slow process. Plus a lot of them seem to be less treat motivated than dogs (even the greedy ones sometimes!). And they forget stuff, as you said.

Maybe it depends on the training method. I prefer to use a clicker. I haven’t bothered trying to train cats to do stuff any other method, it is so much easier to train them to not do stuff. Its a bit boring…birds and dogs are much more engaged/engaging and fun IMO :)

We were clicker training (and training them not to do stuff is training). What I found was that isolating a behavior was harder to start in a dog. Once started it was easy to move on from, but it was harder to start.

We were training them to do much the same as dogs on skills courses. Jumping over/through things, going around obstacles, etc. Never did get them to jump into water. :)

I find the opposite – as I said, I find cats just do a lot less, thus displaying less behaviours overall, making it a longer wait for them to do something I’d want to isolate. :P Just a slower process all round with most of the kitties I had a go with. So maybe not actually more *difficult* if you have time, but in practice a dog is easier (for me) to train because it takes less time to get started and for stuff to stick. Chickens are my favourite though. I got much quicker with the treats/clicks after spending some time with my little galliforme buddies :D Raptors and llamas were my least favourites. So much flapping and clawing, and barging around, respectively…

I still have not managed to train my lizard to do anything. He always wants grapes or mussels, or to crawl up my back, or go for a walkabout, but only when nobody is watching, of course…that scaly bastard has me wrapped around his little claw. SIGH.

I wish I still had the book with the first pic I saw of a Turkish Van. It was a b/w photo so made her markings look a bit darker, and she had the biggest, eyeliner-edged eyes (like a Chinchilla cat) you ever saw. She looked like she needed a belly-dancer’s jewels and veil. :)